Director, Data & Product Engineering

Hybrid, LA area, Bay Area, NYC metro, and South Florida

THE ORGANIZATION

Accion Opportunity Fund (AOF) is a leading Community Development Financial Institution dedicated to providing underserved small business owners with access to capital, networks, and coaching. For over 30 years, AOF has helped small business owners create jobs, build wealth, and strengthen communities by providing responsible financing and business support services.

Since our founding, we have deployed more than $1 billion in financing and have served more than 4 million entrepreneurs through educational resources and business support programs. The majority of our clients come from historically underserved communities where access to traditional financing remains limited.

As AOF continues its mission of expanding financial inclusion, we are building a scalable, sustainable financial institution that combines mission impact with strong financial performance. Our strategic vision includes expanding our lending capabilities, strengthening enterprise risk management, and preparing for future growth across additional financial products, including Credit Union services.

We are looking for a Director of Data and Product Engineering to build and run the systems behind our data and analytics, our AI deployment, and the products our small business owners rely on.

This is a hands‑on, highly technical role. You will join as an individual contributor on a small engineering team, writing code, designing pipelines, and shipping systems yourself. You have managed engineers before, and we expect you to grow into leading a team here as our roadmap expands, but your first year is about building rather than staffing.

We have never had a dedicated data engineering leader, and that is the gap we most need you to fill. You will own the data platform: the infrastructure, ingestion, orchestration, and tooling that our analytics and reporting depend on, along with the internal and eventually external data and AI products we build on top of it. You will spend the balance of your time on product engineering, for both customer‑facing and internal products, across AOFCD and AOFCU.

The blend of technical execution, business understanding, and communication is what makes this role work. In a single day you might go from coding with Claude Code (including writing the evals that tell you whether the output is any good) to reviewing AWS infrastructure changes to presenting a build‑versus‑buy recommendation to the executive team. You will report to the Chief Technology and Strategy Officer (CTSO).

HOW THIS ROLE FITS

AOF has multiple data‑focused teams across the organization, and they depend on you.

Credit owns the credit models, policies, and related analytics spanning from up‑front credit decisioning to analysis and management of the credit portfolio. Finance and Accounting synthesize all levels of reporting using a combination of data sources and techniques. They have been at the forefront of adopting AI and have been actively working with the engineering team to help us improve the internal data and AI tools we have developed; they will be key customers as you connect more finance‑related systems into the data platform. Analytics Engineering and BI owns the dbt transformations, the core data models, Tableau reports, and ad hoc analytics used historically by much of AOF. Marketing is using data to transform the way potential customers find out about AOF. Operations relies on data and tools developed internally to guide their day‑to‑day activities servicing the portfolio and caring for AOF’s customers. Your team owns the platform all of that runs on, and owns the data and AI products we build on top of it.

Therefore, a meaningful part of this job is partnership with teams you do not control through an org chart. Your platform will be judged on whether their work gets faster, more reliable, and less surprising. We are looking for someone who finds that arrangement energizing rather than frustrating.

WHAT YOU WILL WORK ON

Data platform and infrastructure

• Own the infrastructure AOF teams build on: our lake and warehouse, orchestration, dbt execution environments and CI, and the developer experience around all of it.
• Build and operate the ingestion layer that lands data reliably from source systems, including our Salesforce orgs and Salesforce Data Cloud, our lending systems, the credit union core, and third‑party partners.
• Treat reliability, performance, cost, lineage, and observability as deliverables in their own right rather than cleanup work.
• Design for governance and privacy from the start: access control, PII handling under GLBA, and auditability across two legal entities with different regulators.
• Build the platform capabilities that regulatory and funder reporting depends on, including CDFI Fund reporting, CFPB Section 1071 small business lending data collection, and NCUA requirements as AOFCU comes online, working alongside the teams that author those models and reports.

Data and AI products

• Design and build internal data and AI products on top of that platform, and over time external ones for the small business owners we serve.
• Deploy AI capabilities responsibly in a regulated lending context, including evaluation, monitoring, and clear boundaries on what a model is permitted to decide.
• Design and ship customer‑facing and internal products alongside a core engineering team working in Python, Go, TypeScript, and Terraform.
• Analyze product requirements and new product ideas, contribute to go‑to‑market plans, and make build‑versus‑buy calls informed by customer needs, market trends, competitor offerings, and potential partnerships.
• Develop, communicate, maintain, and hold production timelines.

Architecture, security, and engineering practice

• Drive architectural design of key platforms, APIs, and AWS infrastructure to support both data and product needs.
• Help complete the migration of our remaining on‑premise services onto AWS.
• Demonstrate and demand robust security and sound data design in every implementation.
• Lead constructive, collaborative, informative code reviews, and strengthen our CI/CD and infrastructure‑as‑code practice.

Partnership and leadership

• Build relationships across AOF so that you understand each team’s strategy, constraints, and opportunities, and can translate them into systems that deliver on our strategic plan.
• Coach and mentor engineers and analysts, and help nurture a culture of open, respectful debate about technique and technology.
• Communicate credibly with engineers, data analysts, senior management, third‑party partners, and regulators.

OUR STACK

Aurora and PostgreSQL for transactional data. S3, Glue, Athena, and Redshift for the lake and warehouse. dbt for transformation, Airflow for orchestration, and Python throughout. Salesforce is central to how the organization operates, and we work across Salesforce orgs and Salesforce Data Cloud. Application and infrastructure work spans Python, Go, TypeScript, and Terraform on AWS. We use AI coding agents, including Claude Code, as a normal part of development. A few remaining services still run on legacy on‑premise systems and are on their way to AWS.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE IN YOUR FIRST YEAR

• You have a clear, documented picture of our data platform and a prioritized plan for it that the CTSO and business leaders agree with.
• The Credit team and the Analytics Engineering and BI team both ship models faster and with fewer surprises than they can today, and they would say so unprompted.
• Ingestion from Salesforce and our core systems is reliable, monitored, and no longer a source of recurring firefighting.
• The reporting we owe to regulators and funders is produced from the platform rather than assembled by hand.
• At least one internal data or AI product is in real use, and you have shipped meaningful product engineering work alongside it.
• We know together what your team should look like, and you are ready to build it.

WHAT YOU WILL BRING

• Seven or more years building and running data platforms and product systems in production, with real depth on both sides rather than depth in one and familiarity with the other.
• Deep data platform experience: lake and warehouse architecture, orchestration, and ingestion pipelines you have kept running under real load, plus enough fluency with dbt and dimensional modeling to be a credible partner to the analytics engineers who write those models.
• Experience integrating and operating pipelines against enterprise SaaS systems, particularly Salesforce, ideally across multiple orgs and including Salesforce Data Cloud.
• Strong software engineering and platform skills, including API design, AWS architecture, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code.
• Experience leading a small engineering team, roughly two to five people, with a track record of coaching and mentoring.
• Fluency with AI‑assisted development. You have shipped production code with coding agents and have informed opinions about where they help, where they do not, and how you verify what they produce, including writing evals.
• Business fluency and excellent communication. You can work through a technical tradeoff with an engineer in the morning, explain its business consequences to executives in the afternoon, and get things done with teams that do not report to you.
• Experience in financial services or another regulated, data‑sensitive industry, and comfort building where security, privacy, and auditability are requirements rather than preferences.

BONUS POINTS

• Experience with small business or consumer lending products.
• Experience in a credit union, bank, or de novo charter environment (NCUA, BSA/AML, SOC 2).
• Deep hands‑on Salesforce platform experience or Salesforce certifications.
• Experience putting data or AI products in front of external customers.
• Hands‑on experience building mobile or web user interfaces.
• AWS certifications.
• Experience migrating services off on‑premise infrastructure.

We know strong candidates sometimes rule themselves out over a single line on a list. If you meet most of what is above and this work sounds like yours, we would like to hear from you.

PERKS AND BENEFITS

Our mission is what motivates us to come to work each day. We know that happy employees are productive employees, which is why we offer a comprehensive benefits package that includes:

• Competitive salary commensurate with experience.
• An environment that values work‑life balance, and monthly remote work reimbursements.
• 100% company‑funded medical, dental, vision, life, and disability coverage for employees (based upon your plan selection), and 90% company‑funded dependent coverage (based upon your plan selection), as well as Flexible Spending Accounts.
• Voluntary benefits with payroll deduction for supplemental life and AD&D insurance and legal plans.
• Tax‑deferred and Roth 403(b) retirement plan with employer match.
• Unlimited paid vacation days, 12 paid holidays, 1 floating paid holiday, 10 sick days, and paid parental leave.

COMPENSATION

Salary Range*: $170,000-$230,000, plus an annual discretionary 10% Target Bonus.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

We are an equal opportunity employer and committed to improving diversity, equity, and inclusion at Accion Opportunity Fund. AOF does not discriminate in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy and gender identity), national origin, political affiliation, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, genetic information, age, membership in an employee organization, retaliation, parental status, military service, or other non‑merit factor.